2 Ways to Install CWM Recovery on Any Android Device – TechWhoop

No matter what other users say, Android OS has one fantastic advantage which ‘they’ don’t have. The ability to customize the crap out of our phones! Rooting your device is one of the common things these days. No matter which Android device you’re having; you can pretty easily get yourself root access to its kernel. But to fully take advantage of being a ‘superuser,’ you need an excellent recovery tool. Thus, you must know how to install CWM Recovery to your device.

Some popular names come to mind when we talk about recovery software, and CWM is one of them.

CWM Recovery

Clockwork Mod is one of the legacy software made for android root enthusiasts. I have been using it since 2013 as I remember! It’s a pretty necessary, but convenient recovery to have on your phone. So how to get it on your device?

So if you are a beginner to the world of rooted benefits, here are two simple ways to install CWM recovery on ANY android device, within seconds!

How to Install CWM Recovery

App method

CWM luckily have a dedicated app for us, right in the Google Play store! It is called ROM manager by CWM. You can download the app from here.

On the app, the first thing you will see is the option to ‘flash Clockwork Mod recovery.’ Select it and select the model number of your phone. Almost all the phones out there are supported, so very rarely will you ever get a message like your device is not supported yet.

ROM Manager

Once you see your device, select the recovery version, as latest as possible. Then select yes. It will give you a prompt saying that the device has to reboot to install the recovery, select OK. The phone will shut down and do some stuff on the screen and will reboot right back up.

Reopen the app, and it will show the current version of CWM recovery installed on your device. This whole process will not take any more than a few seconds to a minute to complete.

Didn’t work? Don’t worry. There is another effective method to get CWM up and running on your device. It is slightly more detailed than this method but works just as fast.

Through ADB

ADB essentially stands for Android Debug Bridge. It allows you to install files on your phone directly from your computer’s storage, without copying them first. It’s pretty cool and fast.

First, you need to set up ADB and Fast-boot drivers on your PC. It takes about 2 seconds to do it, that’s all! Download the ADB installer from this link.

ADB installer

Once the file has been downloaded, run it with Administrative privileges. Type Y in the command window and hit enter every time it asks you a (Y/N) question. It will only ask twice or thrice. After that, give it some 15 seconds to run and Bam! Universal ADB is installed on your system.

Then you will need to have the recovery image ready. Download the correct CWM image file for your phone from a download site, link this one.

Make sure that you have also enabled USB debugging on your phone. You can do that by first enabling developer mode.

Navigate to about section on your phone and tap on the build number option multiple times. After 6 to 7 taps, it will say ‘you are now a developer.’ Then go back, and you will notice that there is a new option above the about phone option, called Developer settings. Click on it.

Inside it, scroll down to UB debugging option and select the tick box. It will prompt a warning saying that debugging can be used to harm your phone and what not. All that is true, but we won’t be doing any of that, so select OK.

Then, hook up your phone to your computer via USB cable and go to the place where you have installed the adb software. It will usually be under C:\adb.

Then, press and hold the shift key and right click in that file location. Select the option ‘open command window here’ from the right-click menu. Then type this simple single line command and hit enter: ‘adb reboot bootloader.’

Your phone will reboot into the bootloader screen. Then type fastboot flash recovery cwm.img. Replace the CWM.img with whatever the file name of your downloaded recovery is. Then just hit enter and wait.

CWM Recovery

If you have the necessary USB drivers, your phone will have CWM recovery installed on it. The installation barely takes a few seconds to finish. You can check by booting into recovery either using the same adb command or by manually pressing down the volume down button and the power button simultaneously.

ADB drivers that we installed are universal and will work with virtually any Android device that you could own. If for some reason, your device is not listed in the ROM manager app, you can always follow this method to get the benefits of having a custom recovery image installed on your android device. It takes a few seconds to finish.

Note: Sometimes you might see “waiting for device” message on the adb prompt. It happens because you do not have proper functioning USB drivers for the device that you’ve connected. Just download the universal google USB drivers and update the same over in the device manager, and you be able to continue from that stage.